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The Smalltalk-80 metaclass hierarchy as a UML diagram Diagram of the inheritance and instance relationships between classes and metaclasses in Smalltalk In Smalltalk , everything is an object . Additionally, Smalltalk is a class based system, which means that every object has a class that defines the structure of that object (i.e. the instance ...
In Python, everything is an object, even classes. Classes, as objects, have a class, which is known as their metaclass. Python also supports multiple inheritance and mixins. The language supports extensive introspection of types and classes. Types can be read and compared—types are instances of type. The attributes of an object can be ...
Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object or class may only inherit from one particular object or class.
an example of ontology with a first metaclass order: the classification of some chemical atoms. Some ontologies like the Cyc AI project's classifies classes and metaclasses. [5] Classes are divided into fixed-order classes and variable-order classes. In the case of fixed-order classes, an order is attributed for metaclasses by measuring the ...
The inheritance hierarchy of an object is fixed at instantiation when the object's type is selected and does not change with time. For example, the inheritance graph does not allow a Student object to become an Employee object while retaining the state of its Person superclass.
Not all languages support multiple inheritance. For example, Java allows a class to implement multiple interfaces, but only inherit from one class. [22] If multiple inheritance is allowed, the hierarchy is a directed acyclic graph (or DAG for short), otherwise it is a tree. The hierarchy has classes as nodes and inheritance relationships as links.
In general, the further down in the hierarchy a class appears, the more specialized its behavior. When a message is sent to an object, it is passed up the inheritance tree starting from the class of the receiving object until a definition is found for the method. This process is called upcasting.
In languages supporting multiple inheritance, such as C++, interfaces are implemented as abstract classes. In languages without explicit support, protocols are often still present as conventions. This is known as duck typing. For example, in Python, any class can implement an __iter__ method and be used as a collection. [3]